Olmert wanted to annex 6.3 per cent of the West Bank to Israel, areas that are home to 75 percent of the Jewish population of the territories. His proposal would have also involved evacuation of tens of thousands of Jews living in dozens of settlements in the Jordan Valley, in the eastern Samarian hills and in the Hebron region.

In return for the annexation to Israel of the major settlement blocs along the 1967 border and adjacent to Jerusalem, Olmert proposed the transfer of territory to the Palestinians equivalent to 5.8 percent of the area of the West Bank as well as a safe-passage route from Hebron to the Gaza Strip via a highway that would remain part of the sovereign territory of Israel but where there would be no Israeli presence.

Jerusalem, one of the major sticking points, remains unified under Israeli control.

Many Israelis, Zionists and Jews, suspicious of a long-held Palestinian fantasy of driving the Jews out of the region completely, would consider Olmert's map a decent offer and a good test of the Palestinians committment to nation-building and a two-state solution.

Palestinians and their supporters would argue that they were being sold short yet again. Every time a partition map is drawn up, their allotted territories shrink and a viable state becomes less tenable.

In any event, the negotiations between Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas never got going. The Israeli PM was mired in corruption allegations and the war in Gaza put all talks on ice.

Now, however, President Barak Obama is committed to re-energising Mid East peace negotiations. Pressure is on Israel, beginning to feel the cold shoulder from old friends, to continue the negotiations from the point where they were cut off last year.